Tag: Earth

Editor’s note: Today’s commentary is based on a talk Farah is giving to Chuck Missler’s Koinonia Institute in Idaho this weekend. Maybe you saw the headlines in January of this year. “Planet Earth makes its own water from scratch deep in the mantle” – New Scientist, Jan. 27, 2017 “Did Earth makes its OWN water deep… Continue reading “Water, Science, And The Bible”

Ancient Judea pottery that spanned from the 8th to 2nd century AD suggests that a fluctuating magnetic field is a natural cycle.

Map Ancient Judea -Daily Mail

Readings made from ancient clay jar handles from the Middle Eastern kingdom of Judah suggest that Earth’s magnetic field won’t collapse anytime soon.

Researchers have previously warned that the planet’s magnetic field intensity is in sharp decline. They claim this could flip weather patterns and cause a chaotic disruption of Earth’s communication systems.

But the researchers from Tel Aviv University [and University of California San Diego] have used ancient clay pottery to reveal that the current dip in Earth’s magnetic field is likely just part of its natural cycle. DailyMail

The Jars

The new research is based on a set of 67 ancient, heat-impacted Judean ceramic storage jar handles, which bear royal stamp impressions from the 8th to 2nd century BCE, providing accurate age estimates.

“The period spanned by the jars allowed us to procure data on the Earth’s magnetic field during that time — the Iron Age through the Hellenistic Period in Judea,” says Dr. Ben-Yosef. “The typology of the stamp impressions, which correspond to changes in the political entities ruling this area, provides excellent age estimates for the firing of these artifacts.” …

“Ceramics, baked clay, burned mud bricks, copper slag — almost anything that was heated and then cooled can become a recorder of the components of the magnetic field at the time of the event,” said Dr. Ben-Yosef. “Ceramics have tiny minerals – magnetic ‘recorders’ – that save information about the magnetic field of the time the clay was in the kiln. The behavior of the magnetic field in the past can be studied by examining archaeological artifacts or geological material that were heated then cooled, such as lava.” BreakingNewsIsrael

Clay contains the mineral magnetite, which when put under the intense heat of a kiln transforms into a permanent record of the alignment and intensity of Earth’s magnetic field at the time. Image Courtesy Prof. Oded Lipschits U of Tel Aviv

Magnet Field Fluctuations

The data they collected showed a decline in the planet’s magnetic field intensity over a 600-year period. But the team also found a sharp upward lift in the eighth century BC.

The findings support theories that there have been two upward spikes in Earth’s magnetic field intensity, known as the Levantine Iron Age ‘geomagnetic spikes.’

The researchers’ findings confirm the second of these proposed spikes and also reveal that the magnetic field around the Middle East dipped after 732 BC, dropping 27 percent in just three decades. DailyMail

No Reason For Alarm

But a new study published in PNAS from Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and University of California San Diego researchers finds there is no reason for alarm: The Earth’s geomagnetic field has been undulating for thousands of years. Data obtained from the analysis of well-dated Judean jar handles provide information on changes in the strength of the geomagnetic field between the 8th and 2nd centuries BCE, indicating a fluctuating field that peaked during the 8th century BCE.

“The field strength of the 8th century BCE corroborates previous observations of our group, first published in 2009, of an unusually strong field in the early Iron Age. We call it the ‘Iron Age Spike,’ and it is the strongest field recorded in the last 100,000 years,” says Dr. Erez Ben-Yosef of TAU’s Institute of Archaeology, the study’s lead investigator. “This new finding puts the recent decline in the field’s strength into context. Apparently, this is not a unique phenomenon – the field has often weakened and recovered over the last millennia.” BreakingNewsIsrael

Then God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.”God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse; and it was so.God called the [e]expanse heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, a second day. Genesis 1:6-8

In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the same day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened. Genesis 7:11

A battered diamond found in Brazil confirms a long-held theory: Earth’s mantle holds an ocean’s worth of water.

“It’s actually the confirmation that there is a very, very large amount of water that’s trapped in a really distinct layer in the deep Earth,” said Graham Pearson, lead study author and a geochemist at the University of Alberta in Canada. The findings were published today (March 12) in the journal Nature. LiveScience

Scientists have struggled for years trying to understand the source of Earth’s oceans and the planet’s water. Until recently, the prevailing scientific theory held that icy comets hit the Earth while it was still forming. A discovery last year by geologists seems to prove that the real source of the earth’s water is from deep underground, amazingly similar to the Bible’s account of creation, which described waters below and waters above (Genesis 1:7).

The first clue came in the form of a battered diamond found in Brazil. Graham Pearson, lead study author and a geochemist at the University of Alberta in Canada, discovered the diamond quite by accident while searching for a means of dating the diamonds. Diamonds that have come up from so deep from the earth are usually discarded by diamond miners since they are scarred and discolored, having little commercial value. This diamond contained a rare mineral called ringwoodite, which has never been found on the planet’s surface before. It only forms under extreme pressure and is only found in meteor fragments or is artificially made in laboratories.

The diamond was brought up from the earth’s mantle region, which stretches from 254 to 410 miles deep, by volcanic activity. The mantle, the hot rock layer between the crust and the core, makes up most of the earth’s volume. It has never been explored since it is incredibly deep and inaccessible, and the geothermal energy at that depth would melt any drill bit.

The ringwoodite found embedded in the diamond was 1.5 percent water, contained not as a liquid but as hydroxide ions (oxygen and hydrogen molecules bound together). This suggests there could be a vast store of water in the mantle transition zone. BreakingNewsIsrael

The discovery of the first terrestrial ringwoodite by University of Alberta scientist Graham Pearson confirms the presence of massive amounts of water 400 to 700 km beneath the Earth’s surface. Image: University of Alberta

Within days of my conversation with the people about the young man who espoused a flat earth, I had two additional, yet independent, conversations with people having similar concerns about two other Christian young people. However, while the first young man merely talked about a flat earth as an intellectual exercise, these two young men apparently had become convinced that the earth may actually be flat. With three conversations over less than a week, I wondered, “Is there something going on out there?” There had been a few warning signs along the way. During the previous six months I had been asked about the flat earth several times. One was from the department that handles correspondences and questions directed to Answers in Genesis. It seems that people submit a question about this to Answers in Genesis often enough.

Lack of knowledge of the reasons we know that the earth is spherical.

Most people have not given this question any thought, because they have been taught their entire lives that the earth is spherical, so why worry about it? Consequently, with no idea of the reasons we know that the earth is spherical, most people long ago entered a complacent state of more or less taking someone else’s word for the matter. When someone comes along, such as this young man, who has given this some thought and begins to raise what appear to be simple objections to the earth’s spherical shape, it doesn’t take much to fluster most people.

How people in the ancient world knew the earth is spherical.

Earth’s Shadow

So how did people in the ancient world know that the earth is spherical? The earliest recorded discussion of a spherical earth is from Pythagoras in the sixth century BC. Pythagoras correctly understood that the cause of lunar eclipses is the shadow of the earth falling on the moon. This can happen only when the moon is opposite the sun in our sky, which coincides with full moon. The earth’s shadow is larger than the moon, so we cannot see the entire shadow at once.

However, during a lunar eclipse we see the earth’s shadow creep across the moon. Because the edge of the earth’s shadow always is a portion of a circle, the earth’s shadow must be a circle. If the earth were flat and round, similar to a disk, it could cast a circular shadow, but only for lunar eclipses that occur at midnight. For a lunar eclipse at sunrise or sunset, the earth’s shadow would be an ellipse, a line, or a rectangle, depending upon how thick the disk was compared to its diameter. However, the earth’s shadow during a lunar eclipse is always a circle, regardless of the time of night when the eclipse occurs. The only shape that consistently has a circular shadow, regardless of its orientation, is a sphere….

Are flat earth people for real?

Are these people who believe in a flat earth for real? It’s hard to say. They could be well-intentioned but seriously misguided people. Or they could be attempting to discredit the Bible and Christianity….

At least some of the people behind this upsurge in the flat earth movement may be lampooning the creation movement. As such, they clearly are no friends of the church; rather, they oppose Christ and His kingdom.

In 2013, Bryan Chan and four friends launched a weather balloon with an attached GoPro in Arizona. They also attached a smartphone with the hope of finding it after it landed by using GPS.

But their plan failed and the GoPro could not be found.
Two years later an AT&T worker was on a hike and found the camera and phone. She took it to an AT&T store that used the SIM card to track down the students and returned footage to them.

An edited version has been posted online.

As miraculous stories go – this is one of the highest order. Literally. A group of students who lost their GoPro after using a balloon to send it 98,000ft high had their camera handed in two years later.

Bryan Chan and his four friends were even more amazed when they viewed the long-lost footage, which showcases spectacular views of the Grand Canyon from the edge of the stratosphere.

The five students attached the camera and a smartphone to a helium weather balloon before launching it not far from the canyon in Arizona in 2013.

They had planned to use GPS to monitor the balloon’s position, which should have allowed them to easily retrieve the camera when it fell down to earth.

But their plan did not work out – with the phone losing signal as it plummeted to the ground. DailyMail

March 20th is the spring equinox , the first day of Spring when the day and night are nearly equal length. On March 20th there will be a total solar eclipse and a supermoon.

Image courtesy of NASA. Click on the image to view full size.

The celestial spectacle can be observed from large parts of North America, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and South West Asia. The area where the total eclipse can be observed lies within a wide corridor across the Northern Atlantic, North Sea and Norwegian Sea. The only populated places where the total solar eclipse can bee seen are the Faroe Islands and the Svalbard Islands (between Norway and the North Pole).

Is temperature data of the past being adjusted to fit an agenda? It certainly seems to be the case.

Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville says, “that the data does need to be adjusted — but not the way NOAA did it. For instance, Spencer says that urban weather stations have reported higher temperatures partly because, as a city grows, it becomes a bit hotter. But instead of adjusting directly for that, he says that to make the urban and rural weather readings match, NOAA “warmed the rural stations’ [temperature readings] to match the urban stations” — which would make it seem as if all areas were getting a bit warmer.”

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.

Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.

Homewood has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded. This has surprised no one more than Traust Jonsson, who was long in charge of climate research for the Iceland met office (and with whom Homewood has been in touch). Jonsson was amazed to see how the new version completely “disappears” Iceland’s “sea ice years” around 1970, when a period of extreme cooling almost devastated his country’s economy. Read more at the Telegraph

Dr. Tribe is a noted liberal Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rule to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants is unconstitutional because it violates the Tenth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment, according to a noted liberal Harvard law professor.

“In short, coal has been a bedrock component of our economy and energy policy for decades,” writes constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe. “The [EPA’s rule] demonstrates the risk of allowing an unaccountable administrative agency to ‘make’ law and attempt to impose the burden of global climate change on an unlucky and unfortunate few.”

“EPA’s singling out of a mere handful of emitters and limiting (or curtailing) their property is exactly the type of overreaching the Fifth Amendment seeks to prevent,” Tribe, who is on retainer for the coal company Peabody Energy, wrote in his comments to the EPA.
Continue Reading at DailyCaller

24/7 livestream of Earth from the Space Station. NASA’s new experiment placed 4 HD commercially available cameras on the exterior of the space station and uses them to stream live video of Earth for viewing online. The livestream will appear black when the International Space Station is in orbital night, about every 90 minutes for about 40 minutes. The Space Station takes 92 minutes to make one orbit 16 times a day. The Space Station orbits the earth fast at about at 17,500 miles per hour (28,163km).

Population boom in cities in mountainous regions of China has led to a project to level more than 700 mountains in China’s Gansu province and other provinces, to make room for urban development. Two years into the project Chinese scientists at Chang’an University have questioned the undertaking.

This is reminiscent of an ancient Chinese fable, ‘The Foolish Old Man who Removed the Mountains’. In the tale, a 90-year-old man convinces his disbelieving neighbour that he can dig away, stone by stone, two mountains that block the way from his house. Because he succeeds (albeit with the help of deities) the fable is often cited — including by Mao Zedong — to illustrate the power of perseverance. But in our view, China should heed the story’s title: earth-moving on this scale without scientific support is folly.

The tearing down of mountains was embarked on with little review of the cost and benefits of land creation. In Yan’an, much of the soil excavated from mountains and used to fill the valley is loess, a silty soil that subsides when wet. Building on loess, loamy deposits, is not the best choice.

From 2002 to 2012 the European Space Agency Envistat satellite, the largest Earth observation satellite, circled the Earth collecting information on our environment. Contact with Envistat ended in 2012 but a wealth of information and images were collected. In 2014, the European Space Agency launched multi-satellite projects providing more amazing images.

Namib Desert in southern Africa

Greenland Ice Sheet

Ireland, Great Britain, and Northern France

Mississippi River Delta

Mesopotamia

Every week, the European Space Agency releases a new satellite image taken by Earth-observation satellites showing incredible places on Earth.

The studies support a link between pesticides used on crops with bee colony collapse disorder (CCD). Neonicotinoids are used for coating seeds. A major source of contamination comes during sowing when bees are exposed to dust dispersed in the air from neonicotinoid-coated seeds. Madeleine Chagnon –20 years of bee research “While we wait, the bees are dying”

Italy banned banned neonicotinoids when they are used for coating seeds, although it is still permitted to spray the compounds on the leaves. A sharp drop in mortality of bees was observed around the maize fields in the spring when sowing takes place. Europe banned the use of neonic pesticides last year.

Italy banned neonicotinoids when they are used for coating seeds, although it is still permitted to spray the compounds on the leaves. A sharp drop in mortality of bees was observed around the maize fields in the spring when sowing takes place. Europe banned the use of neonic pesticides last year.

In southwest China wild bees have been eradicated by excessive pesticide use and loss of natural habitat. In recent years, farmers in China have to hand-pollinate their trees, the apple and pear orchards in southwest China, they carry pots of pollen and paintbrushes to individually pollinate every flower.

The evidence linking these neonicotinoids to CCD is significant but not yet conclusive, critics have voiced concerns that the study sample size is too small, that the study’s did not control for other potential reasons for CCD.